Witold Gombrowicz ‘”Yvonne, the Burgundy Princess” in Frankfurt
W.hen you get the dramaturge’s enthusiasm. His desire to present the audience with a play that they most likely don’t know anymore. Alexander Leiffheidt is the name of the studied philosopher and literary scholar who lived and worked in Austria and Great Britain before he switched to the German theater system in 2010 and came to Frankfurt via Marburg and Bochum. In his “Notes on the Piece” he presents unpretentious thoughts on the reception and meaning of Witold Gombrowicz’s “Yvonne, the Burgundy Princess”. He writes vividly about the “charming eroticism of the void” hidden in the grotesque from 1938, reflects on the lines of development of the characters and honestly admits how difficult it is to stage this exaggerated, absurd and senseless material: “It tips over Play on one side, it BECOMES dead machine ballet, on the other, it becomes a banal family drama or a Shakespeare parody. “
While one is usually used to the most quickly leafed through program booklets that they die, die of time, chew the cud, dutifully recite the favorite vocabulary of the current discourse makers and stick to a short description of the piece’s content and author’s biography, Leiffheidt takes the genre of program announcements seriously and leads with a few, but informative short texts comprehensively in the piece. He also quotes, but not the theoretical trivia that is currently in circulation, but rather what emerges from the reception history of the piece, which was once widely played. Not only does the Marburg literary scholar Jürgen Joachimsthal, who died young, have an appearance, but also the outstanding poetry and text representative François Bondy, whose son Luc brought his own opera version of “Yvonne” to the stage in Paris.
An idiocy turned explosive
After reading the program, the expectations are high. As big as the words and interpretations that one encounters on the way into the auditorium sound: “an alienated mirror”, “a waste product of the emergence of modernity”, “an idiocy turned into an explosive” – this is all this piece is supposed to be . What you get to see on stage then actually corresponds in many ways to what you hold in your hands in print: Here you can experience the rare case of a staging in which the dramaturgy follows your trust. Set designer Raimund Orfeo Voigt, for example, took the void at its word and placed a variable turntable in the wide Frankfurt stage, above which an indirectly lit cube hovers, which rises and falls depending on the mood of the protagonists.